Only three players managed to master the wind and finish under par on the first day of the Latin America Amateur Championship (LAAC). Guatemalan José Arzú and Mexicans Omar Morales and Santiago de la Fuente opened the tournament with 69 strokes (-1) to share the lead in the debut at the Santa María Golf Club in Panama.
Morales, a junior at the University of UCLA who played in the last US Open at Los Angeles Country Club, achieved the lowest round in the morning shift with four birdies, one bogey and one double bogey (this on his penultimate flag, 7, as he started on 10). The player best ranked in the world amateur ranking (72nd) has won two university events in the last two years and is making a second appearance in the championship after being twenty-fourth in this event in 2020.
“I think my game above the green was really good. I played very well with the driver, not so much with the irons, especially with distance control. But it was difficult because the wind was in a different direction and blows quite strong. You may not feel it on some shots… you just have to adapt and hit good shots over and over again,” Morales emphasized about his initial round.
De la Fuente, who along with Morales seeks to become the second Mexican player to win the LAAC after Álvaro Ortiz, finished his round with a birdie on the last hole to also finish under par. It is his fourth participation in the event in which he has two top 10s in his three previous participations. He made birdies at 2, 10 and 18 and signed bogeys at 9 and 17.
“I was 99% conservative. We couldn’t go for the flag on the holes that were closer to the middle of the green. Anything past the middle was possible to go for the flag. But if it was shorter, you had to be very conservative,” De la Fuente, a player at the University of Houston, pointed out about the difficult conditions of this first day.
Arzú, from Harding University, missed the cut in his only appearance in the LAAC (Puerto Rico 2023), but started this edition with three consecutive birdies (10, 11 and 12) and, although he then added a similar negative sequence (15, 16 and 17), he grabbed another success at 3 to close his card with 69 strokes.
“I think I have given hope to my teammates. I wrote to them in a chat we have, and I told them ‘I’m going to put the flag up on the scoreboard’. It’s an honor to see the Guatemalan flag on my cap and on my shirt. I feel very honored and I will do everything possible to make the young people feel proud,” Arzú highlighted about the success of the Guatemalan players in the debut.
Meanwhile, Argentine Segundo Oliva Pinto, Paraguayan Héctor Ortega and Guatemalan Alejandro Villavicencio finished one stroke behind the leaders after scoring a round of 70 strokes. Ortega aspires to surpass Gustavo Silvero (ninth in 2018) as the best result of a Paraguayan in the championship. Argentina showed its potential by placing four players in the top ten: apart from Segundo Oliva Pinto, with +1 are Juan Martín Loureiro, Joaco Ludueña and Vicente Marzilio.
On the other hand, Aaron Jarvis (+9), from the Cayman Islands, will not only have a very difficult time defending his victory from two years ago in the LAAC, but also making the cut after a round in which he signed eight bogeys, one double bogey and a solitary birdie.
